“... a private prosecution against the magazine on a charge of blasphemous libel because of a poem by James Kirkup it had published which described Jesus having sex with a variety of men, including Pontius Pilate. John Mortimer and Geoffrey Robertson appeared for the defence, but lost. Gay News was fined and its publisher given a suspended prison sentence. ‘I ...”

“... women who had escaped from their owners in London, only to be recaptured, came to public attention.James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother ...”

“... West End, with its salubrious air and proximity to the Houses of Parliament and the Court of St James’s, was more attractive than ever. Its rise was unstoppable, its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent ...”

“... Ben Elliot. Starmer’s former chief of staff, Sam White, went to Flint Global, where his boss is James Purnell, who served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Flint claims to offer its clients – which include Meta, Amazon and Uber – ‘unparalleled insight into how Labour thinks and works’. The former home secretary Jacqui Smith was a specialist partner ...”

“... the image of the moustachioed bandido, which morphs smoothly into that of the moustachioed drug lord. The association of Mexico with violence takes an even more pernicious form in the minds of repressed intellectuals, who celebrate the everyday mayhem in a poor country with a deplorable judicial system as evidence of some more honest, vital relationship ...”

“... of mischief (‘it never occurs to you you’ll be rejected’). In interviews, she claimed both James Boswell and Giuseppe Verdi as ancestors; it’s not impossible, with the middle name Boswell and a mother née Verdi, but there’s a whiff of family romance to this self-construction. She wrote little about her mother, though it’s clear their ...”

“... gave a reading at the Keynote Club in Manhattan. Kallman and another Brooklyn student, Walter James Miller, were in the audience, with Kallman sitting in the front row giving the two international pederasts the glad eye. Afterwards he and Miller went backstage. Miller was tall, blond, Anglo-Saxon and (a friend who was not a ...”

“... To Sotheby’s where I’m reminded of a lunch given for Alec Guinness in 1989 when I sat next to Lord Charteris, the Provost of Eton and previously the Queen’s Private Secretary. Talking of A Question of Attribution, then playing at the National, he remarked: ‘Of course, the question everybody asks is whether the Queen knew and whether he knew that the ...”

“... to give way to interiority: it became a psychic injury, a ‘thorn in the spirit’, as William James put it, an injury done not to the body but to the mind by violence, or by any unspeakable or unassimilable experience. In the 19th century and much of the 20th these mental wounds were understood to be represented in the body by such symptoms as ...”

“... The wage-slave works on a thing, but sees his work as alien, because he’s doing it for the lord of industry, who pays him a wage: ‘A definite social relation between men assumes the phantasmagoric form of a relation between things.’ ‘That’s the crucial sentence,’ Rose says. I looked it up in my own copy to check I understood it, and found it ...”

“... has in BSkyB, a stake which proved sufficient to have Murdoch’s 30-year-old college dropout son, James, appointed chief executive of the company, in the face of opposition from other shareholders. When I say News Corp is ‘his company’, I mean it’s a company of which he owns about 35 per cent, the exact amount varying from time to time as his ...”

“... herself was solitude: ‘Don’t you know you are happiest while I withhold,’ she wrote to Judge Lord in 1878, ‘don’t you know that “No” is the wildest word we consign to language.’ Writing to Austin in 1863, Bowles sent his best to Dickinson with a hint of snark: ‘to the Queen Recluse my especial sympathy – that she has “overcome the ...”

“... extravagantly vulgar suffer from Sutherland’s sceptical attention. The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham (1895), by ‘John Oliver Hobbes’ (Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie), inspires the tough comment that it is ‘depressive and “sensitively” written (i.e. almost impossible to read), in the style fashionable in the 1890s’. Quotations are deployed ...”

“... the weather has improved: here at the point of annihilation, all our brothers and sisters, We ask Lord God to acquit us all. Pound, too, at the end of his ‘personification’, gets Villon’s drift quite beautifully, in a prayer for the poet and his friends which draws directly on the same envoi: God damn his hell out speedily And bring their souls to his ...”

“... that constitutions at home and abroad were unsettled – and that the Prince Regent seemed a Lord of Misrule: they did not know when the Great Reform Bill would be passed, as prologue to the stable reign of Victoria. In times like these, Abstract Ideas have great power. David Bromwich does (with proper suspicion) include one or two good anecdotes, to ...”